Vol 14, No 1, Article 3

IntroductionI am a psychotherapist and a criminal lawyer. I don’t know whether I feel myself to be more one than the other. I do know, however, what these two roles have in common. They require that I undertake the difficult task of helping people resolve problems: be they legalor psychological. People come to me for all sorts of reasons – they suffer from emotional or behavioural disorders; they’ve been accused of a crime, or have been the victim of one; they don’t get along with their families; and so forth. I don’t consider these people as sick people in need of a cure, as individuals with problems they wish to resolve. Rather than seeing them as being afflicted by symptoms, I see them as entangled in situations, with psychological and circumstantial knots from which it is my job to untangle them.Keywords: Humour, clinical practice.